Just Jackie by Edward Klein (web based ebook reader txt) 📗

“Why, that’s wonderful, Oliver,” she said.

“This?” he said with a vehemence that Jackie rarely heard in his voice. “This doesn’t mean a thing. It won’t last. What I do is fleeting, and I’ll be forgotten tomorrow. A great painter or writer—now their work will last forever.”

YOU CAN’T KNOW ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER

In April of 1965, Lee gave Jackie a New York coming-out party. She cleared away the furniture in her dining room and placed a five-piece Lester Lanin ensemble at one end of the room beside the windows. She brought in huge bouquets of multicolored spring flowers, and lots of champagne. And she invited all the beautiful people to toast “Her Elegance,” as Women’s Wear Daily had recently christened Jackie.

By ten-thirty, however, all but one of the guests had departed.

“The party was a flop,” Lee moaned.

She was standing in the kitchen of her Fifth Avenue duplex, dressed in a lime-green silk crepe Yves Saint Laurent ball gown. She and Stas lived in what many people considered to be the most spectacular apartment in all of New York. Friends were stupefied when they entered the drawing room, which was like a stage set worthy of an Italian opera. Created by the interior designer Renzo Mongiardino, the room had elaborate carved wood paneling and walls upholstered in raspberry-colored velvet, with a painted band of scrollwork up and down the corners and around the top and bottom of the room.

“Oh, God, the party was such a flop!” Lee repeated.

“Well, darling, it was just one of those evenings,” said the actress Kitty Carlisle Hart, who was a regular panelist on the television program To Tell the Truth and knew when to be candid with friends. “Something just didn’t click.”

“It was a big flop, all right,” Stas agreed. “Jackie’s presence put a crimp on things.”

Lee did not want to admit it, but Stas was right. Jackie had put a crimp on things. For the few hours that she had deigned to stay at the party, Jackie had acted like a queen, making everyone feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. It was almost as if Jackie had wanted Lee’s party to fail. Jackie could never stand to share the spotlight with Lee.

“Lee was utterly impatient with the public sentiment that had turned her sister into a monument,” wrote Diana DuBois, Lee’s biographer. “As Jackie’s sibling, she knew all too well the weak spots in her character, and the chinks in her psyche. If the key to Lee was held by her relationship to her sister, then the reverse was true, and one could never truly know the one without knowing the other. Once, in an unguarded aside, Lee told a friend, ‘You should see that woman! She wakes up in the morning, and goes through all the newspapers looking for her name, and if she doesn’t find it, she just throws them all away, and when she sees her name, she cuts it out immediately!’ ”

“How about some champagne?” Stas asked. He popped open a fresh bottle.

“I’ve got wonderful news,” Kitty said, trying to inject a note of gaiety. “I’m going to play Marriage-Go-Round in summer stock. Stas, how would you like to be in it with me?”

“Of course,” Stas said, going along with the joke. “I would be very good.”

“But you’ll have to learn your lines, Stas,” said Kitty, a veteran trooper, who had appeared with the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera, and whose recently deceased husband, the famous playwright Moss Hart, had directed the musical Camelot.

“Oh, I can’t be bothered learning lines,” Stas said.

“Then you can’t be in my play,” Kitty said. “How about you, Lee?”

“Oh, Kitty, I would love to be in it,” said Lee. “Desperately. Why don’t you send me the script so I can read it.”

Caught off guard, Kitty took another sip of champagne.

“Well, darling,” she said, “you should be on the stage. I’m sure you’d be marvelous. I’ll send the script around tomorrow morning.”

Lee did not know what to do with herself these days. Her marriage to Stas was on its last legs. And she was falling farther and farther behind in her competition with Jackie.

When they were growing up, Lee had been the beautiful one, and the one with a firmer grasp of fashion and style. As a young woman, she worked as a special assistant to Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Harper’s Bazaar who later moved on to run Vogue. Then Lee lived in England, traveled with the jet set, and had the richest and most glittering friends. Even when Jackie was First Lady, and went around trying to look like Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy interpretations made by Oleg Cassini, Lee consoled herself with the thought that it was she, not her older sister, who lived the life of a true sophisticate.

Now, however, everything was topsy-turvy. Lee was about to become an impoverished divorcee, and Jackie was being celebrated as the most beautiful and stylish woman in the world. A poll of American newspaper publishers disclosed that the story that would get the widest readership among their female readers would be entitled, “Jacqueline Kennedy Remarries.”

Magazines were not waiting for that day. Photoplay, the magazine of Hollywood celebrities, put Jackie on its cover with the headline TOO SOON FOR LOVE? Movie TV Secrets featured her in a piece called “Jackie’s New Neighbors Tell All … WHERE SHE GOES, WHO SHE SEES, WHAT SHE DOES!” Modern Screen’s March issue offered “Jackie Kennedy Changes—Her New Life, Her New Look, Her New Love….”

Jackie was stealing all of Lee’s old friends: Vivi Stokes, Truman Capote, Diana Vreeland, Rudolf Nureyev, Baron and Baroness Fabrizio Serena. The gossip columns kept track of Jackie’s escorts: economist John Kenneth Galbraith, set designer Oliver Smith, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, British diplomat Sir William Ormsby-Gore, man-about-town Roswell Gilpatric, and director Mike Nichols, who had brought her to tonight’s party at Lee’s apartment.

People said that Jackie was more famous than any movie star, perhaps the most famous woman of the twentieth